DJND

As someone who is able to modify lua I'm always very happy if game mechanics and user interface is opened up to modification by players. I've been very disappointed when I couldn't find either the ship editor nor the user interface when you are flying around anywhere in the opened lua sources. Many parts of the UI give the impression to just be added to have something to use and then be left as 'good enough'. It is tedious to access ships or stations via 'F' and even worse interface design to have to press shift to free the mouse and then to move it up right to access the trade module. How i'd wish to bind that to a hotkey. To make that more logical, I'd call it 'grouping', as do many other 3d model editors. A grouping of blocks can then be used in the same way as a block itself, i.e. rotate, resize, fit to somewhere and so on. After adding a template of blocks (hm, isn't that just like a grouping there?) you only need to add said template instead of recreating a good curved grouping of blocks. Deliver the best templates with future versions of the game and voila, your wish was fulfilled. ;)

Uhm, with the block system we currently have we can create those 'curved' blocks however we want them to be curved. Just take lots and lots of the blocks we can use and create templates, start small. On a computer, to simplify rendering graphics, all curved shapes are essentially lots of small triangles put together so that it looks curved from the players point of view. The complexity of an object can be described by how many triangles are used for it and it quickly gets up to tens of thousands of them. Pretty similar to how we build our ships. Still, many people are just lazy and create a round shape just by splitting it up into a 6 to 8 sided polygon and don't take the time and effort to really make it look like a circle. Although it might be nice to have additional templates shipped with the game to save people from having to reinvent the wheel again and again. Perhaps a way to exchange templates like we already do exchange ship builds? Oh, and for gods sake, a better way to organize all those ship models. Adding a folder system would be a start. I'm always deleting those autosave ones that the game insists putting in the middle of my real collection of ships. Arg! Thats of a bother enough to drive me up the walls! And I can't even add that feature myself since the build mode doesn't seem to be part of the available scripts. Grr! It should be a rule that any game developed has to at least have one team member that has a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I'm sure all those games over the years that were so highly praised for it's love to details had someone with OCD on the team.